Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Focusing on activities

Why do so many online courses focus on content? If your
learners have a text book, why do so many instructional designers feel they
have to replicate the text in the online course? What does this accomplish?

Well, I’ve been pondering those questions for years – and asking
my colleagues to focus on creating activities to support the learning
objectives rather than paraphrase the text. It’s more difficult, it takes
longer…and it can lead to an excellent learning experience…

So how do we create activities not content? Some
instructional designers argue that because they are not content experts, they
can’t be expected to be able to determine what the learners need to know at the
end of a lesson. Well, I do a lot of developing sans content expert, and here’s
what I’ve discovered: if I have a good learning objective, I can design
activities to support that objective. If the objective is a simple “Describe…. “
(I hate those) I can have the learners search out descriptions on the web, in their text, or through conversations with
others. Better yet, I can give them the descriptions and ask them to match them
to terms using a simple interactive application. Ever play My Word Coach for
the DS or Wii? One of the quizzes in that program does just that – except you’re
racing against the clock. As you proceed through the levels, the terms and
definitions keep coming back to you in various games, and at the end of each
level you’re almost certain to have a far better understanding of the term than
you did at the start of the instruction.

Instead of providing content, I provided an interactive
activity that my learners would enjoy – and that would help them learn and
understand the terms they need to be able to go on to the next activity. Next
post, I’m going to tell you how and why I designed that activity.

About Me

Hi there. I'm an instructional designer currently living and working in Newfoundland, Canada. I create online learning for a post-secondary institution, and also create online and face-to-face corporate training.